9/11: It's Tragic

It's tragic that so many people died a horrible death.

It's tragic that their families have lost people they love.

It's tragic that so many questions remain unanswered.

It's tragic that the promise "to find, to get them running and to hunt them down, those who did this to America" has remained unfulfilled.

It's tragic that so many heroic firefighters and police officers died on 9/11 because their equipment was substandard and outdated.

It's tragic that the events of 9/11 have unleashed a pro-macho, anti-woman fury in the American media.

It's tragic that the events of 9/11 have been used as an excuse to start horrible, bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's tragic that soldiers are still dying in those wars.

It's tragic that so many Muslim people suffered persecutions on religious and racial grounds after 9/11.

It's tragic that the American response to 9/11 confirmed all of the worst stereotypes about this country among the people of the globe.

It's tragic that 9/11 was used to strip the American people of their freedoms.
It's tragic that in response to religious fanatics attacking this country on 9/11 we allowed another group of religious fanatics to hijack the White House.

It's tragic that the suffering of the victims of 9/11 and their families is still being used by politicians for ideological manipulation.

It's tragic.

As a tribute to the events of 9/11, I wanted to share with you a poetry by a talented Palestinian poet-song writer Ikhlas ("Yasmin") Jebara. You can find more of her poetry here.

TO SAY OR NOT TO SAY

I wonder whether to say or not to say
To be enthusiastic
to revolve
or to obey
For God or for people to pray
Or like a refugee without home to stay
Or like a child in the streets to play
Or to pass through a narrow or wide way
Or our hopes for future to delay
Or to sit under the red x-ray
Here we are my friend
with no decision
Whether to be or not to be
we do not know
Whether to say or not to say

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid: A Review, Part II

In the aftermath of 9/11, the worst side of the US that Changez tried so hard not to see for so long starts coming out:

It seemed to me that America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time. There was something undeniably retro about the flags and uniforms, about generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honor. I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white. What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me—a time of unquestioned dominance? of safety? of moral certainty? I did not know—but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent.

As Changez learns to see the truth about America, he starts questioning his own role in the imperialist domination that this country strives to exercise over the entire planet. He realizes that he is complicit in every crime that he blames on the United States:

I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn! I had thrown in my lot with the men of Underwood Samson, with the officers of the empire, when all along I was predisposed to feel compassion for those, like Juan-Bautista, whose lives the empire thought nothing of overturning for its own gain.

As this realization dawns on him, Changez begins to see the entire structure of the American society in an completely new way. His job at a prestigious Wall Street firm that has been such a source of pride (and an impressive income) for him takes on an entirely new dimension in Changez's eyes:

I was struck by how traditional your empire appeared. Armed sentries manned the check post at which I sought entry; being of a suspect race I was quarantined and subjected to additional inspection; once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to a serf class lacking the requisite permissions to abide legally and forced therefore to accept work at lower pay; I myself was a form of indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent upon the continued benevolence of my employer. . . As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums.

Once he has arrived at this painful insight, Changez is compelled to reexamine and eventually change everything about his life.

Hamid is just beginning as a writer and this is only his second novel. There is a certain heavy-handedness that sometimes comes through in his writing. From time to time, he fails to recognize the moment when the writer should stop explaining himself and let the readers draw their own conclusions. He is also still searching for his own voice, and that's why there is quite a lot of V.S. Naipaul in the way he constructs his sentences and builds his plot. Still, these little flaws can be forgiven to an author who can create a book as beautiful as The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

In the recent decades, the writers from India and Pakistan have produced the best literature in the English language of anybody on the planet. Moshin Hamid is a wonderful addition to the pantheon of great writers from the region who keep literature in English alive.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid: A Review, Part I

Moshin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a really good book. I can't imagine I have gone so long without discovering this great writer. When the book came out in 2007, it apparently awakened a lot of strong emotions in the readers. In many cases, this strong emotional response obscured the beauty and the importance of this book.

The plot of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is quite simple. Changez, a young Pakistani who was educated at Princeton and worked on Wall Street, is telling his story to a nameless American he meets in a restaurant in Lahore. Changez is both fascinated and repelled by America that offered him an education and a lucrative job but at the same time, made his life intolerable in a multitude of ways. Changez's uneasy relationship with America is mirrored by his equally painful involvement with a woman called Erica. (As you can see, Hamid is quite heavy-handed with the way he names his characters. He makes his Erica-America parallel so obvious that it becomes annoying.)

When Changez first arrives in the US, he discovers that the opulence that surrounds him in his Ivy League school and his Wall Street job makes it difficult to maintain the same vision of national identity that he brought with him from home:

For we were not always burdened by debt, dependent on foreign aid and handouts; in the stories we tell of ourselves we were not the crazed and destitute radicals you see on your television channels but rather saints and poets and—yes—conquering kings. We built the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we built the Lahore Fort with its mighty walls and wide ramp for our battle-elephants. And we did these things when your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent.

As much as Changez prides himself on his people's glorious past and enjoys contrasting it with the recent historical origins of America, he has to rely on his American success to gain access to a social class his family was expelled from in Pakistan. For a while, Changez manages to swallow all the instances of discrimination he experiences. He also studiously avoids noticing the suffering of people who lose their jobs as a result of his professional activities. The reward for being an obedient little cog in the Wall Street machine is too high.

But then 9/11 comes and Changez cannot maintain his state of obliviousness any longer. His initial reaction to the events of 9/11 is complex, ranging from contentment to shame, and he explores it honestly. In the US, everything that has to do with 9/11 has been transformed into a holy cow of sorts. Any attempt to analyze what happened and how one reacted is branded as anti-American. Hamid's book received a lot of criticism for daring to discuss 9/11 in a way that is a little more profound than the official narrative. Unfortunately, those who insist that the only valid narrative of 9/11 is the simplistic one sold to us by George W. Bush don't realize that they are not doing us all any service by denying this hugely traumatic event the right to be explored in all its facets.

Susan Faludi's "The Terror Dream"

It's great to read books where the author expresses everything you believe. Pierce's Idiot America was such a book for me. But it's equally great to read an author who offers you a completely new perspective on things. Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream gave me an opportunity to analyze the post-9/11 media and politics from a feminist point of view. Or rather, from the point of view of the damage that the collective trauma of 9/11 did to the feminist movement and its achievements.

The terror attacks of 9/11, Faludi argues, punctured the myth of America's invincibility. The feelings of fear and insecurity that everybody experienced as a result led to the emergence of a series of phenomena aimed at restoring this feeling of invincibility and security. Sadly, this restoration was conducted along the lines of the patriarchal vision of gender: "The myth of American invincibility required the mirage of womanly dependency, the illusion of a helpless family circle in need of protection from a menacing world. Without that show of feminine frailty, the culture could not sustain the other figment vital to the myth, of a nesting America shielded by the virile and vigilant guardians of its frontier. As the pageant of domesticity played out on the lifestyle page, the spectacle of virility unforlded on the political stage." Faludi's book analyzes the ways in which the media attempted to convince us of the validity and the profound relevance of the patriarchal worldview for the post-9/11 world.

Armed with her truly extensive research, Faludi demonstrates that the responses to the trauma of 9/11 represent a coherent whole, fueled by the call for the return to the traditional gender roles: "Taken individually, the various impulses that surfaced after 9/11 - the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls - might seem random expressions of some profound cultural derangement. But taken together, they form a coherent and inexorable whole, the cumulative elements of a national fantasy in which we are deeply invested, our elaborately constructed myth of invincibility."

Faludi analyzes the reasons behind many events that in the aftermath of the trauma we might have failed to notice and address. The push to present the heroes of 9/11 as exclusively male and its victims as exclusively female (even though this goes against all available evidence). The evisceration of female intellectuals (Barbara Kingsolver, Susan Sontag, Katha Pollitt) for saying the exact same things that their male colleagues were saying with impunity at that very moment. The promulgation of unsupported myths about women deciding to abandon the workplace in massive numbers, women choosing family over careers, and women desperate to get married and have babies as a result of 9/11. The push for the return to traditional gender roles. The fictitious image of "security moms." The treatment of 9/11 widows and the complete marginalization of 9/11 widowers. The story of Jessica Lynch that was based on an incredible number of lies and distorions.

Faludi delves into the depths of American history in order to disinter its foundational myths and discover why the collective trauma of 9/11 provoked such an unequivocally gendered response. Well-written, brilliantly argued, beautifully researched, Faludi's book is definitely worth reading.